When computers were first developed, they were very expensive. As a result, only large research institutions and corporations could afford them. Consequently, computers were primarily being used to solve scientific problems (e.g., simulating the behavior of fluid) and support business operations of large corporations (e.g., processing accounting and customer records of insurance companies). The software programs designed for these purposes communicate with users using numbers and text. The users of these software programs were technically trained, and were comfortable in such environment. Thus, there were little needs for these programs to present information in graphic or image forms.
During the past few years, the price of computers decreased drastically. Computers are now purchased by many homes and small businesses. The users of these computers are more comfortable in dealing with multimedia environments involving a combination of graphics, text, image, animation, sound, etc. As a result, various multimedia hardware and software components (such as sound cards, video cards, CDROM readers, game software, educational software, etc.) were rapidly developed. Currently, many computers on the market are sold with a sound card, high resolution video card and color monitor. These computers are sometimes called "multimedia computers." Computer applications that make use of some or all of these components are called multimedia applications.
Multimedia applications are based on graphic images and icons. The interface with users is commonly called a graphic user interface (GUI). In contrast, old style interface is based on single line commands. Multimedia applications are more difficult to write. One of the reasons is that GUI needs to coordinate a large number of computer resources. For example, it typically needs to monitor both a keyboard and a mouse (while command line based interface only needs to monitor a keyboard). Users can click on an icon located anywhere on a computer screen (while command line based interface allows users to enter commands line by line only). The output of GUI could be graphic images, movie and/or audio sound (while command line based interface generates text only). It can be seen from the above that it is not easy to write multimedia applications.
While it is difficult to write multimedia applications, the graphic environment encourages people who had little or no prior programming experience to develop applications. For example, people who have experiences in graphic design, movie making, song writing, etc. could be interested in using their skills and training in a multimedia computer environment. Currently, there is a small number of authoring software that allow users to develop multimedia presentations. An example is Director 5.0 marketed by Macromedia Inc. However, they are difficult to use and the variety of presentations are limited. Consequently, there is a need to develop an easy-to-use and flexible multimedia authoring software.